From order to delivery, we at ConText® translation agency use proprietary project management software based on ISO 9002, DIN 2345 and European industry organisation EUATC standards. All of our translations comply with the European EN 15038 standard in completeness and form.

Our specialist Chinese translators transfer all of the content while preserving the sense of the original and keeping the style appropriate to the translation’s target audience, giving you an accurate and authentic translation that looks like an original.

Modern technology also allows us to leverage previously verified sentences while keeping the technical terminology consistent in translation, giving our Chinese translations at ConText® a consistent writing style. Our translators integrate your terminology requirements, comments and corrections in databases for further use in every project.

The Chinese language – characteristics and spread

Around a fifth of the world population speak Chinese as their native language. Chinese is the official language of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (Taiwan), and is one of the official languages of Singapore and the United Nations.

The name Chinese usually refers to the standard dialect of Mandarin Chinese (Putonghua, or Mandarin), whose pronunciation is based on a standardised form of the Beijing dialect. Mandarin is spoken and understood in many parts of the PRC. Another very well-known dialect is Cantonese, which is spoken in Hong Kong – many business people learn this dialect for business reasons.

Chinese has a number of dialects in addition to standard Chinese, and these are mainly divided into North China and South China; they vary from one another about as much as German does from Dutch. The southern Chinese dialects are closer to classical Chinese, and the northern are closer to modern standard Chinese.

Chinese is a tonal and highly analytic (syllable-based) language; tonal languages involve the tone of a word in meaning. Mandarin has four. The first tone is spoken at high unchanging pitch – spoken in the first tone, the word ma means mother. Spoken in the second tone, which rises from a lower pitch, ma means hemp. The pitch lowers and rises again in the third tone, and ma means horse. The fourth tone falls to a short emphasis; ma spoken in the fourth tone means cuss.

Long or short characters – traditional or simplified Chinese?

The communist government in the People’s Republic introduced a writing reform in 1949 in a measure towards reducing illiteracy rates in the population. This made the most commonly used characters “easier” – that is, the number of strokes in a character was reduced. This involved reducing the imagery in the character, and also led to many younger Chinese people only learning the simplified form, making it very difficult for them to read traditional characters, so older texts and texts from other Chinese-speaking countries were inaccessible to them.

Simplified Chinese is only used in the People’s Republic of China. Taiwan, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Macao still use the old characters of traditional Chinese.